I'm currently 20 hours and 4 "episodes" deep into Death Stranding 2 on PC and I don't have the patience to wait til the Monday megathread rolls around again to voice my thoughts. This isn't my first time playing a Kojima game; I've got over 100 hours in the first Death Stranding and I've also finished multiple entries in the Metal Gear series, I've even played Boktai 2 on the GBA (though I didn't know that was a Kojima game til much later). I enjoy the vision, wackiness, flexibility in gameplay, and emphasis on little details that are fairly characteristic of a Kojima game, and those things are definitely very present in this one as well. That said though, there is one thing that only becomes more and more clear as I progress:

Hideo Kojima is terrible at writing dialogue. By that, I don't mean characters fail to express themselves or convey ideas well through a lack of words; rather, they're entirely too reliant on words. In an era of cinema that loves "show, don't tell", Kojima leans more towards "tell, tell, tell some more, and then maybe have a bit more tell as a treat". Any character with a backstory that Kojima wants you to know about will spend a good 10 minutes unloading their life story almost as soon as they meet the main character. Any time there's a new piece of information being revealed, someone will explain it to you in textbook-level depth. I'm not sure if Kojima thinks that it's ok to have so many incredibly long exposition-dumping cutscenes in his game because the ratio of cutscene to game is still fairly low but all I can say is these cutscenes and talking sequences are not good cinema. I don't care which movie star is getting a cameo when the script itself is this absurdly poor, my immersion is shattered and watching has now become a chore.

That said though, it's not like the game is devoid of cinematic moments, they just happen to be entirely outside of the cutscenes themselves. By far the most memorable and impactful moments in this game and the original are those times of solitude during a delivery where you're just quietly traversing through a zone, luggage in tow, and a Low Roar track starts playing. It's during these moments of calm, of pure show and no tell at all, where the player gets truly immersed in the role of the main character and has time to contemplate their journey while taking in the beauty of the nature around them. These aren't accidental or purely player-driven moments, those songs are set to play at a particular place during certain missions and knowing Kojima, he definitely had a major role in directing these as well. So it's not like he doesn't know how to create absolute cinema, but at the same time it's limited purely to gameplay moments where you're not forced to listen to someone deliver a 10 minute monologue in a way that no actual human being talks.

So yeah, thanks for not becoming a movie director, Kojima. Your script writing's terrible but your gameplay ideas are great. I'd suggest you hire an editorial team but you probably already have and ignore them.

Picture: One Battle After Another

This became a tight race with Sinners late in the game. The obvious parallel here is 1917 and Parasite. 1917 won PGA, DGA, and BAFTA just like OBAA did. Parasite won SAG Ensemble and went on to win Picture from there.

I’m betting on OBAA being stronger than 1917. Notably 1917 was never in contention to win a Screenplay or an Acting award the way OBAA is. And OBAA is nominated in Film Editing and the front-runner in that category which 1917 missed.

I have correctly predicted every Picture winner since The Shape of Water but this is the first year where I’m in danger of losing that streak.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson - One Battle After Another

Whether Sinners ends up winning Picture, I think this goes to PTA regardless.

Original Screenplay: Sinners

Adapted Screenplay: One Battle After Another

Lead Actor: Michael B. Jordan - Sinners

After Chalamet shot himself in the foot with his unorthodox press run for Marty Supreme, Jordan is the only one in the category going in with an industry award as the BAFTA awarded a British actor.

I think Chalamet really fucked up his chances to win for a while and will now win well into his 40s or even into his 50s. He should have played it better.

Lead Actress: Jessie Buckley - Hamnet

Supporting Actress: Amy Madigan - Weapons

After winning SAG it seems like it’s heading that way. Mosaku won the BAFTA but she had a homefield advantage. This is also an opportunity to award a veteran actress who never got her due, and will be supported by young people who enjoyed Weapons.

Supporting Actor: Sean Penn - One Battle After Another

Despite not campaigning and not appearing at the majority of the award shows (or perhaps because of that) Penn ended up winning both the SAG and BAFTA. Essentially sleepwalking to his third Oscar.

Original Score: Sinners

Original Song: Golden from KPop Demon Hunters

Sound: F1

Casting: Sinners

Production Design: Frankenstein

Cinematography: One Battle After Another

Sinners was originally the front-runner and would have made history as the first female cinematographer to win. However it lost both the ASC and BAFTA for Cinematography.

Makeup and Hairstyling: Frankenstein

Costume Design: Frankenstein

Film Editing: One Battle After Another

Sinners won the ACE Drama awards and OBAA won the ACE Comedy award. This category used to be correlated with Sound but since the sound categories were merged it has now correlated with Picture.

VFX: Avatar: Fire and Ash

Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters

Documentary Feature: The Perfect Neighbor

International Feature: Sentimental Value

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

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I have a bare bones prototype of a game made in twine and I will be honest it needs a lot of work.

The story and main architecture of the game is already planned and I am happy with it. It is the story hooks and pathing that I am looking to improve and for that I would like to give out a early Alpha build for volunteers to critique and provide any dead ends, errors and story beats they find engaging.

Please feel free to send a message if you would like to participate. Thank you for your time.

Edit: Thank you for your interest in the game the final build should be ready for volunteers in one week. I will send links to you directly at that time. Thank you again for your interest this is much better than I hoped for.

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Has anyone solved the Wordle at wordleunlimited.org today? I just got the answer on my first try, which seems unlikely to say the least. I think it could be a malfunction. Would anyone mind posting the answer under a spoiler box so I can check? Thanks!

Update: Thanks, folks! It seems like the site uses a different word for each person. It also seems like it's working fine. So, go me! Or it was a one-off problem. My word was AUDIT, btw.

TLDR/Warning: this might be a tedious read. But I'm curious if I could have gone about rating my albums better.

I tend to simply either favourite an album or not. The idea of giving albums and tracks marks out of five stars seems tedious, difficult to match to how I feel and just doesn't match how my head works. But my collection has grown over the decades and I've been bed bound a lot lately, so I'm trying to organise/categorise based on my feelings towards the albums rather than genre. I'm also hoping to rejuvenate my old interest in music (playing in a band and recording for a living took the shine off of casual listening for me). I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try out, so I rated songs from over 50 albums.

I came up with a rigid and hopefully balanced definition for each rating:

• 1 star - Dislike. I hope I never hear this song again (but I'll keep it purely because it's part of the album)
• 2 stars - Neutral. It doesn't annoy me, but it's too generic to be interesting
• 3 stars - Sometimes this song hits the spot.
• 4 stars - This song usually hits the spot.
• 5 stars - This song always hits the spot.

Then I rate the album out of five stars based on the average of the song ratings. The result is that no albums got 5 stars, a seven got 4 stars, the vast majority of albums are rated at 3 or 2 stars. Even among the 3-star albums, some I like much more than others depending on whether they contain mostly consistent 3-star songs or half 4-star songs and half 2-star songs.

I wonder if the lack of 5-star albums is because of the definitions I gave each of the 1-5-star possibilities. For example, I don't know if any song "always hits the spot". Or maybe it's just that I'm not as into my music as I used to be.

Anyway, I thought maybe people interested in music and data might have thoughts on going about this differently. It's worth asking before I do the next 1,000 albums :) Maybe you'd define each of the 5 stars differently. Any takers?

Edit: thanks to everyone for reading all this and commenting their thoughts. I have a system I'm happy with now, but always happy to continue to chat with fellow (and reluctant) pedants about this.

I’m in the process of helping someone come up with lore and I was wondering if there was a website to help with suffixes related to lore and mythology. Things like adding ist, kin, age, folk, etc to try and make new words for beings or creatures.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like sunsetting, subnautica.2 and delphi. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was living under a rock.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

For a while I've had a habit of collecting hobbies and moving from one thing to another. Sometimes I stay in the hobby for a long time, but eventually I move on. Even within a hobby I have some subhobbies that I move between (in TCG's I've moved from MTG to Flesh and Blood to now Riftbound, but I'll still jam some MTG games too of course). I used to be more into weightlifting, now I only go to the gym for chest day because I've been doing rock climbing for a year and have recently picked up archery.

For people who kinda do similar things, what's a favorite hobby you've collected? Have you dropped it or pulled back from it once you found a new hobby? What's your latest hobby that you've been into? Do you still keep your old ones, and how do you balance everything and find new hobbies to try?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I have a friend who recently started reading fiction books for the first time since he was a teenager. It's been great recommending him some books, and he is currently exploring different genres to find ones he likes with a goal of one book a month this year. I was chatting with him about his reading today and this got me thinking about the books I enjoy and associated tropes of different genres.

This made me think it might be fun seeing what my fellows tilders think about tropes in books.

• Do you have any tropes in books that you love?
• On the flip side, do you have any tropes that you can't stand?
• Are there any novels that execute these tropes well/poorly?
• Do you find yourself enjoying tropes being subverted?
• Anything else trope related you want to chat about!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!